BURN
RATE

You are the architect on call. Build a design from AWS parts, then watch one simulated day of real traffic hit it. Keep the site up, fast and cheap.

Steps

1. Enter a team name and pick a scenario. Read the boot screen: it lists the SLA, the budget and everything that will go wrong.
2. Drag parts from the left rack onto the board. Zonal parts (EC2, Fargate, cache, RDS, Aurora) go in AZ-A or AZ-B. Regional parts (WAF, CloudFront, API Gateway, ALB, Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, S3) go in the middle band.
3. Drag from a part's cyan dot to the next part to wire them, from the Internet → ... → a data store. Tap a wire to delete it.
4. Tap a part to set its size, count, auto scaling and pricing.
5. Press Start. A day takes 1 minute at 1x; use 2x or 4x to go faster.
6. Read the debrief. Retry keeps your design so you can improve it.

Rules of thumb

• Every request must end at a database or be answered by a cache or CDN. Dead ends lose traffic.
• Use two zones: one zone fails during the day.
• CloudFront in front, S3 for static files, SQS for work that can wait, a WAF when there is junk traffic.

Scoring (100 points)

Missing the SLA or going over budget caps the grade at C. Your best score per scenario is kept on the leaderboard.